dolorosa_12 | Three Sunday morning links

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I've been out in the garden, planting tomato, bean and rocket seeds, so hopefully they'll be all sprouting before long. We also discovered some parsnips planted by the previous owners of the house, which will be a nice addition to tonight's dinner.

And now, some links.

The first is one of those absurd and bizarre stories that only seem to emerge from academia: scams, feuds, researchers disappearing with priceless archives or artefacts. Honestly, nothing I could say will adequately describe it — see for yourselves!

I liked this piece on the Irish language, and the sea. It also has lovely animated videos.

Finally, I wrote an essay of sorts about community, online platforms, and the eternal struggle to find a social media platform that won't, eventually let us down. You can read it here at

dolorosa12.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

merit

While I don't have a Twitter, I have noticed a substantial trend to debut authors having quite the presence before publishing. We get 'sold' a personality or persona but authors aren't marketing professions and I wonder at the idea that someone who publishes a book is necessarily a 'public' figure.

From:

likeadeuce

It's also a double edged sword when people who were 'known' online get blasted for old tweets (sometimes justly but sometimes taken out of context and in any case not necessarily reflective of who the person is today when 10 years ago they might have been a teen.)

From:

dolorosa_12

Absolutely, and to be honest if I were a parent I would probably either bar my children from social media until they were older, or at least insist on pseudonymity. I'm so grateful that although the internet was around when I was a teenager, I didn't get online until I was in my early twenties, stuck to spaces where pseudonymity was the norm, and therefore don't have a permanent, written (or worse, photographic) record of my teenage stupidity there for all to see.

From:

merit

Oh yes, there's that too - if the person is obviously not that person anymore - then the reflexive shaming won't prompt people to every improve. Plus, widely held beliefs do change, words become passe.

From:

dolorosa_12

I wonder at it as well, and I'm pretty sure a lot of authors find the whole marketing of themselves really distasteful. (I think the ones who adjusted best to this state of affairs are those who already had a kind of 'performer' personality and do well in front of an audience.)

I was a newspaper book reviewer from 2002-2013, and it really was such a different world back then. Publishers would send vast quantities of books (either ARCs or just new copies) to the paper, and these would either be assigned to us by the editor, or reviewers could go through the bunch and pick out whichever ones they wanted to review. And if there was a book I wanted to review that hadn't been sent to me, I'd simply phone up the publishing companies, ask to be put through to the marketing department, and the relevant person would send me any book I asked for. I can still remember interviewing authors (Sophie Masson, and Gillian Rubinstein spring to mind) who even back then told me they hated the sense of public performance that was required of them — they wanted to sit in a room, reading, researching, writing and editing, and found anything they had to do to sell the books really uncomfortable.

That whole marketing ecosystem has just been gutted — the papers that used to review books have either folded or drastically curtailed their reviewing section, and because avid readers get their recommendations online from social media, publishers need to find a way to get into that space. And the marketing teams have been gutted as well, with the authors expected to take on most of that work.

From:

merit

The idea honestly seems exhausting. And I get that tone from authors sometimes when I check in on Twitter accounts occasionally.

I think that type of author will seriously struggle in a lot of SFF fiction - even some other genre fiction or literary fiction. An established author might be able to rely on reputation to sell books, but debut or even early novelists have hardly a hope.

Perhaps even that's how debut authors are selling themselves - as an in one package to publishers. After 2020, marketing budgets are going to be stripped back to the bone even further.

From:

nyctanthes

Nothing intelligible to say this morning, but I really enjoyed reading your blog piece.

From:

dolorosa_12

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!

From:

rmc28

Thank you for the piece on the Irish language and sea vocabulary!

From:

dolorosa_12

I'm glad you liked it!

From:

likeadeuce

That's a great essay and I'll just add that Google killing google reader, and lack of a scalable RSS replacement, was the death knell for individually run blog communities. Though even before that, I saw plenty of communities that started friendly and welcoming and then became victims of their own success, where the person who created them had to bail on moderation because it was becoming a full time job and unless there was a strong community willing to take over, things withered or soured.

From:

dolorosa_12

These are all really good points — the RSS thing in particular is really crucial to why blogs began to die a death after Google Reader disappeared.

And as to community moderation, I have bitter experience of this. I ended up moderating a forum, just as it was in its death throes, and it was really far more work than I had the time for. The sad thing is that when I had first started using that forum, I probably would have had the time to moderate it — but not six years later, when I was in the final, frantic stages of my PhD! Really those sorts of communities only work if they can to a large extent police themselves, which only works if they have a robust code of conduct, and clearly shared social norms.

From:

senmut

Thank you. We, again, failed to go acquire mulch and other outdoor supplies, though I did the 'walk the yard for broken limbs' so my mowers don't have that safety hazard.

It is time to outdoors!